Posted on 03/28/2003 12:37:31 PM PST by tuna_battle_slight_return
PARIS - French and United States companies have entered battle over the potentially lucrative business of reconstruction of Iraq after the assumed victory for coalition troops.
Senior officials from the French Ministry of Economics and Finance this week met representatives of the Mouvement des Enterprises de France (MEDEF), the main lobbying group for industry, "to analyze how French enterprises can do business in Baghdad after the war is over", said a source at the ministry.
France is keen to make up for lost business. Its annual trade with Iraq has been worth about US$1.5 billion a year. Estimates of the cost of reconstruction vary from $25 billion to $100 billion. The French moves follow news that the US government has begun to grant contracts to US firms for reconstruction of infrastructure after the war.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) quietly invited a handful of US construction and public-works companies last month to bid for the first reconstruction contracts in Iraq, worth some $900 million. The chosen enterprises were Kellogg Brown & Root, Bechtel, Parson, Washington Group and Louis Berger. USAID did not invite public bidding. "The urgency of the circumstances and the need to give the companies sensitive military information" dictated this procedure, said USAID spokesman Ellen Yount. Contracts would be awarded on the basis of "the companies' experience in this field".
MEDEF wants the French government to make sure that reconstruction is decided at the United Nations. "That way, the whole world will be able to participate in public bidding organized by the UN," MEDEF said in a statement.
The daily Le Monde says that USAID picked the companies "for their friendship" with US leaders. "The five companies contributed more than $2 million to the electoral campaign of President George W Bush," Le Monde reported.
The announcement that USAID had granted a contract to the Texas-based firm Halliburton to fight the fires in oil wells in Iraq and to restore the facilities seemed to confirm French apprehensions. Vice President Richard Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton until 2000. A second contract for restoration work around the southern port of Umm Qasr has also gone to a US company.
The news weekly Le Canard Enchaine says US lobbyists have offered to represent French companies before the US government. "US lawyers, really serious people well known for selling Bush business plans to the Congress, were in Paris to contact leading French companies," the magazine quoted an executive from a leading French electronics group as saying. "The lawyers' message was: if you work with us, the diplomatic tensions between Paris and Washington won't affect your business in Iraq."
An official at the Ministry of Economics and Finances says the government wants to make sure that "our country's legitimate business interests won't be put aside by the US-British coalition. The reconstruction of Iraq is being studied at the ministry. We are considering all aspects, and we're sure that France will get its share of it." French managers are apprehensive that the anti-war position taken by France will provoke business losses and an unofficial boycott of French goods in the US. Another meeting between government officials and MEDEF representatives is due next Thursday, says Gilles Munier, general secretary of the French-Iraqi Friendship Association. "We have to examine how dangerous possible alliances with US enterprises in Iraq might be," Munier said. But he figures that Iraqi resentment against US and British representatives would be so great that it would be impossible for their companies to work safely in Iraq on their own.
Many managers say that such efforts will not work. "We know already that our companies won't get any contract for public works in Iraq," said Yvon Jacob, leader of the French Federation of Mechanical Industries.
These fears are shared by the French oil giant TotalFinaElf, which had signed several contracts with the present Iraqi authorities. A new government is unlikely to honor these contracts, company managers say. "Those who control the oil routes have extraordinary leverage in negotiating oil contracts," said Pierre Terzian, director of the journal Petrostrategies. "In this sense, the new war against Iraq is giving the US-British coalition a strategic advantage in the future management of Iraqi oil."
French President Jacques Chirac does not seem unduly concerned. "We're still in the demolition stage," he said at the European summit in Brussels last week. "Let's wait and see what is left to rebuild."
Since when does France care about Iraq or its people? Only when $$$$ is involved, obviously.
I believe that will happen when the pigs the French use to find truffles become air born.
Funny, I could have sworn that America, Britain and Poland were in the "demolition" stage and that France was in the "demoralization" stage.
The last people on Earth who deserve to make a nickle off the rebuilding of Iraq is the French. They are the same nazi collaborators they always were.
Yeah, so what!?!
The French forget to mention that Kellogg Brown & Root are unsurpassed the world over in their ability to fight well fires and cap uncontrolable wells. Get a clue France, no soup for you.
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